


The Lover's Tale; or Tony Stark, Gentleman Farmer

by musamihi



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Corpses, Gothic, M/M, Monsters, fable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 18:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3083078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stark, a man of science, a man of Hook and Hume and Hales, had little time for sin and retribution, less still for righteousness and condemnation - and a paper-thin patience for his obligatory post in the front pew before his ranks of copyholders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lover's Tale; or Tony Stark, Gentleman Farmer

**Author's Note:**

> Complete with Victorian 'and then they had sex but anyway' ellipses. For a prompt by [HisMightyShield](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HisMightyShield/) : _18th Century Gothic Romance, lots of Byron brooding, gay pining and experimental science. Also foggy moors and soulfulness. AU._ Obviously the Tennyson reference is deeply anachronistic.

The story was that in the black mountains there lived a monster. How long it had been there, no one could agree; but its first appearance in the local lore was the disappearance, some five years ago, of the doctor - who, having been caught body-snatching, had been run out of town in disgrace and had taken shelter in the mountains, never to be seen again. The priest told the people of that county the monster had devoured the doctor, a just punishment for his crimes. 

The priest, in fact, told the people whatever he liked. The sins of the doctor shifted and multiplied in accordance with whatever the priest cared to emphasize in his sermon of the moment. Stark, a man of science, a man of Hook and Hume and Hales, had little time for sin and retribution, less still for righteousness and condemnation, and a paper-thin patience for his obligatory post in the front pew before his ranks of copyholders. Lord of the Manor born, he had nevertheless long since shed the primitive principles of his forefathers that made his property into a divine right. He chafed under the irrational weight of his name. He scoffed at foolish tales of devils and holy justice.

He despised it all, but nonetheless it planted in him an idea. And one Sunday morning, he rose from his seat in the church nursing the beginnings of a grand design.

* * *

Two days after the town's next funeral, the deceased was stolen from his grave. The next village over reported the disappearance of two men recently buried. Week after week, remains were unearthed and vanished. An eruption of panic ensued. Neighbors accused one another, families looked inward with suspicion. Some were driven to the mountains, and some fled there out of desperation.

Near midnight, one man, harried, dirty, tattered and tired, half crept and half stumbled into one of Stark's massive larders. He stole two flanks of beef and slung them over the back of a horse taken from the stables. He was halfway to the fence, beyond which lay a misty expanse of moor backed by the jagged mountains, when Stark met him on the path.

Stark recognized the doctor, and invited him in with a smile.

* * *

The fog outside was thickening. The light in the dining hall was brilliant, magnified by the long mirrors hanging from the walls. Over beefsteak and burgundy, Stark began to melt away the (understandable) chill between burglar and burgled. They had much to talk about - as it happened, they were both enlightened men, both men exasperated with superstition and convention, both men who sought for higher things and better places. They talked about Hook and Hume and Hales, and particularly they talked about Priestly. They were quite animated and quite companionable by the time Stark said, "I know what the monster is."

The doctor paused with his knife against the bone of his meat.

"I know," Stark said, "that you fabricated him."

The doctor's gaze wandered to the mirror behind Stark's chair.

Stark smiled. "And I'm doing you one better."

* * *

_Come with me,_ Stark said at the foot of the great staircase, when dinner dwindled into the dark of the morning. The doctor wavered at the door, his fingers clutching white against the faded fabric of his coat. But he slipped out again into the thick grey dawn.

* * *

Stark went into the fog the night after that, and the night after that, restless with anticipation and with bitterness. In the most silent, deadened moments, when the damp wound around him like a shroud, he thought he heard the man's voice - distant, weak. But the murk would inevitably dissipate, the mountains would loom up in the east, and his house would break upon him to the west like one of the tireless Furies. He felt bound to this land as by an anchor, ground into it like his copyholders had been by the heel of their birth. He would have retreated to the wild in a moment, even if it meant living hunted and on stolen beef.

But he had only to be patient. _His_ monster would loose all the chains; _his_ fabrication would bring about the liberation from religion and from patrimony the people of this county needed. And when everything from cross to capital had been destroyed, what would be left but enlightenment?

* * *

One night, seated on the border stone, gazing out into the deepening dim nothingness, Stark _did_ hear him. And he called out his name, and stretched out his hand - and felt it grasped in return, and pulled the doctor onto his holding. . . . .

. . . . When they descended at last to the cellar, strewn about with pale shapes and the oppressive smell of formaldehyde, the doctor gazed in wonder at the towering form hung at the end of the hall. "How is it animated?"

"How is any puppet animated? I animate it."

The doctor's voice was low. "Is it a puppet?"

"What else would it be?"

"There are monsters, you know," the doctor said, still staring at it with something like greed. "Ones beyond controlling."

Stark's scorn was never far below the surface. "Like the one in the mountains? When my work's done, we'll make our home there, and be the stuff of horror stories for anyone witless enough to believe in monsters. Or we can go where men like you and I belong, where we can do good work, not hemmed in by humbug and tradition. Come with me."

The doctor only shook his head.

"You were looking for something, once," Stark urged him. "What was it?"

"It was true what they said about me," the doctor replied, resting his hand on the stiff white surface of an armless corpse and regarding it with bitterly thwarted ambition, with furious hunger - and with a certain tenderness. "I was a resurrection man."

* * *

The night the work was done, Stark went up the mountains. Nothing remained but to set his plan in action - he had only to say the word, and his monster would destroy the brooding house, the priest, and everything that kept the people tied to the county like galley slaves to an oar. No more dependency, no more order - only freedom. (Whose freedom?) He climbed the foothills sure and light of heart.

_The path was steep and loosely strewn with crags._  
 _We mounted slowly: yet to both of us_  
 _It was delight, not hindrance: unto both_  
 _Delight from hardship to be overcome,_  
 _And scorn of perilous seeming: unto me_  
 _Intense delight and rapture that I breathed,_  
 _As with a sense of nigher Deity,_  
 _With her to whom all outward fairest things_  
 _Were by the busy mind referr'd, compared,_  
 _As bearing no essential fruits of excellence._

At last he passed the tree line to the desolate, rocky peaks. And then he saw it - another mountain, an enormity with a furious hunger in its eyes, a monster that had never been on strings. No puppet.

He turned and he ran.

* * *

He started the fire in the cellar. The fabric of his design went up in explosive flames, and the charred smell of flesh followed him through the burning skeleton of the house and into the raging fires in the fields. Hadn't he seen how men's grand designs could turn to chaos? When his ancestors had built this house and assigned these lands to other men to farm them, had they intended the vulgarity that had resulted, this serfdom that made unthinking dogs of men? Perhaps they had. There were monsters, and ones beyond controlling. Better to trust to the certainty of nothingness, to let chaos take the reins from the beginning. The people of the county could be slaves to God or man or superstition as they wished - he would remove himself from the equation, perhaps the only thing his forefathers would never have thought to do.

By morning, there was nothing left.

* * *

Shortly after sunrise, he crossed the tree line again. In the early twilight he could make out a narrow, jagged cave lit faintly orange. At its mouth he stopped and peered inside; the doctor smiled back at him from behind his dying fire.

"Your work's done," the doctor said, stretching out his hand. "Stay with me."

"No," Stark said. " _That_ work's done. Come with me." And he turned and kept on walking.

After a moment's hesitation, the doctor followed him, and they set out together toward the east, further into the mountains and onto parts unknown, leaving behind the tower of smoke rising from the plains below.


End file.
